Chaos ....

November continues mostly grey, with a brief bright and very cold spell, signalling winter ... plenty of time to wander physically and metaphysically ... wondering, for example, whether the pilgrimages are the perfect balance for exploring the mind alone and with fellow explorers ... and missing the others leads to flirtation with fixed places to be in company ... Bramdean sometime this year, Findhorn perhaps, though both some distance to travel ... Land of Joy more local and offering a surprise visit next Sunday from Osel Hita, the reincarnated Lama Yeshe ... later in December a call for volunteers to clear the land ready for more tree planting, which needs to be fitted round a full Christmas programme with Wheels to Meals ... of course the opportunity to just rest in silence in the warm, dry, beautifully simple, cottage also resonates, though formal sitting not so much ...

A trip to Durham uncovers two new titles for the expanding library ... though there are plenty still unread on the shelves ... first, "On Pilgrimage, A Time to Seek" piques the interest, partly for some clues of the structure of the long gestating Wear & Dao book ... interesting enough, though focusing on the sceptical but conditioned explorations of Jini Fiennes, a lapsed Catholic ... prompted by her skirmish with cancer, which finished her off a couple of years after publication back in 1991 ... published slightly earlier, in 1987, the other book, "Chaos", by James Gleick, resonates for different reasons, since chaos was intuitively explored some years ago during the brief and brilliant period of social enterprise with Cameron, a very clever chap with complementary skills and similar aims to redesign public services in County Durham, as if the customer was important ... this was and remains quite radical, where those delivering the services tend to focus on maintaining high and well paid employment ... a worthy aim, but maybe not at the expense of declining services. .. indeed subsequent years of austerity as public expenditure has been squeezed suggests that Du-services was a little ahead of its time ... as for Chaos, it was recognised that a company doing radical redesign required three elements, leading to three job titles : Director of Chaos, to stir up the decaying matter to release the energy for the new forms waiting to unfold; Director of Progress, to shape and promote the new forms; and Director of Order, since paying the bills and all that admin stuff, resisted by the feckless other Directors, was essential ... a three legged stool ... a nod to pedantic readers acknowledges the apparent paradox of a Director of Chaos, but that's semantics ... more critically Chaos overwhelmed Progress and Process and since the customers for Du services were not the same as the end user, it was a tricky market, seemingly dominated by bureaucrats with no interest in anything which might possibly threaten their comfortable lives ... best not to mention the opaque parallel power structures embedded in public sector organisations, since they have long memories ... anyway, who knows where it might have gone in a parallel world where the timing was right?

Surely not on an adventure exploring inner space without the burden of house, car or anything that didn't fit in a rucksack!